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Advanced Aerospace Systems

Advanced Aerospace Systems covers research areas of interest in aerodynamics, aeroacoustics, combustion, flight mechanics, dynamics, propulsion and power, among many others highlighted below. It is one of the department’s primary research disciplines including mechanical and aerospace engineering-related research and coursework.

Research topics under this area include:

Research efforts in Aerodynamics, Aeroacoustics, Fluid Dynamics and Flow Control (Bons, Gaitonde, Gregory, McNamara, Samimy, Sutton, Whitfield, Zhuang) span a comprehensive range of problems in a wide range of speed regimes with emphasis on tightly integrated experimental and modeling thrusts including static and dynamic stall relevant to rotorcraft operations, jets for commercial and military aircraft, bluff body flows pertinent to turret and other applications, cavity flow for scramjet flow paths, shock/turbulent interactions in supersonic aircraft and various automotive flows.

In the Combustion, Turbulent Reacting Flows and Plasma Material Processing area (Adamovich, S. Kim, Sutton) at Ohio State, we focus on deriving a fundamental understanding of the interplay between fluid mechanics (mixing) and combustion, particularly for the turbulent situation. Areas of interest include flame stability, chemical kinetics and multiphase effects. Diagnostics include a variety of laser-based methods, spectroscopy and flow imaging, with emphasis on obtaining spatially and temporally-resolved data.

The Flight Mechanics, Dynamics and Control (Dai, Kumar, Yedavalli) research area includes robust flight control systems analysis and design using a state space interval parameter matrix and ecological qualitative stability techniques, studies on stability and performance of nonlinear flight dynamics of reusable space access vehicles, as well as satellite formation control. The dynamics and controls thrust is focused on engine area networks which coordinate sensor and actuator data through a controller, successfully managing deployment while reducing weight and life cycle costs and improving performance.

Fluid-Structure Interaction (Gaitonde, Harne, McNamara) focuses on high fidelity and reduced order computational modeling of fluid-structure centric problems, as well as model reduction and partitioned time marching of multi-physical systems. Application areas include hypersonics, wind turbines, micro-air vehicles, automobiles and turbomachinery.

Propulsion and power (Bons, Chen, D’Souza, Gaitonde, Mathison, McNamara, Samimy, Shen, Sutton, Yedavalli) activities include cutting-edge research on turbines and compressors, as well as various types of jets. Problems of interest include blade tip-rubs and blade damping as well as materials and structural dynamics of blades including deposition, heat transfer measurements for internal cooling flows and full-coverage measurement techniques for harsh environment. Numerical simulations are also being performed of unsteady flow in turbo-machinery, flow control and fluid-structure interaction, including aero-elastic analyses of gas and wind turbine blades.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Dai, Gregory, McNamara, Samimy, Whitfield, Yedavalli) research focuses on detect-and-avoid systems which are being developed to minimize collision in busy skies. Efforts are also being pursued in technology development and assessment for ground-based operations, aircraft design and flight testing. A multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort is examining problems related to safe and efficient integration of unmanned aircraft systems in the national airspace system. At sub-system level, modeling and analyses of aeroelastic-actuator interactions in nonlinear systems are being pursued.

Collaborative Autonomous Systems (Kumar) involve multi-agent teams comprising of ground, air or space robots and multi-modal sensors that plan and execute missions in uncertain, unstructured and/or adversarial environments. They aim to maximize information extraction from sensor data and use such information for autonomous decision making, predictive analysis, environmental modeling and system health monitoring.